Lewis P. Simpson

SOURCE: "Sex & History: Origins of Faulkner's Apocrypha," in The Maker and the Myth: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1977, edited by Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie, University of Mississippi Press, 1978, pp. 43-70.

In the following essay, Simpson examines William Faulkner's works as they demonstrate the fusion and interiorization of history and sexuality in the modern consciousness.

As defined by the distinguished British historian R. W. Southern, the stages of the historian's experience of history are as follows: "first the individual perceptions which are the bricks out of which our historical edifices are built; then the ramifications of these perceptions to every area of social or private life to form large areas of intelligibility; and finally the arranging of this material to form works of art of a special and distinctive kind." 1 Reading Professor Southern's analysis of the historical experience at a moment when I was...